Alien Trespass Milks '50s Sci-Fi for Laughs

Share

Alien Trespass Milks '50s Sci-Fi for Laughs

An extraterrestrial beast called a Ghota stares down a young couple in Alien Trespass.Photo courtesy Roadside AttractionsR.W. Goodwin dealt with plenty of aliens and slimy creatures as he helped steer the first five seasons of The X-Files, racking up producing and directing credits on more than 100 episodes during the series' heyday.

Now the director is unleashing a giant rubber monster on an unsuspecting world in Alien Trespass, a so-earnest-it's-funny homage to '50s sci-fi flicks that opens Friday in limited release.

Set in 1957 and inspired by classics like War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still and It Came From Outer Space, the movie gets comedic mileage from the kind of special effects that were once considered scary.

Alien Trespass features Eric McCormack as a scientist whose life gets crazy after an unusual meteor shower, but the real star is an alien monster called a Ghota.

Goodwin describes the jiggling extraterrestrial as "a one-eyed, slimy-looking thing with tentacles that looks like a 7-foot-tall male organ with an eye in the middle. It was real rubber, not CGI, and accurate to the real movies from that time."

A spaceman named Urp crash-lands this flying saucer in the Mojave Desert in Alien Trespass.Photo courtesy Roadside AttractionsGoodwin shot Alien Trespass in just 15 days, steering clear of computer-generated effects. He even refused to use camera lenses invented after 1957.

"We wanted to re-create a true '50s experience," he told Wired.com in a phone interview.

The film starts with a faux newsreel that talks about rockets, moon shots and a lost sci-fi flick called Alien Trespass, setting up the period piece that follows. Festooned with '50s fashions and corny slang, the campy comedy, set in a small California town, delivers a few solid laughs and a heady whiff of nostalgia for the days when cars had fins and extraterrestrials had tentacles.

"On the one hand, there was this innocence where everything seemed wonderful except for this ominous threat of instant nuclear holocaust,"Goodwin said. "Death was going to come out of the sky, and that became the metaphor everyone grabbed onto."

At the WonderCon comic book convention in San Francisco this winter,Goodwin showed an Alien Trespass trailer, then joked about the film's killer beast.